The Spectral Gap of Graphs Arising From Substring Reversals

The substring reversal graph Rn is the graph whose vertices are the permutations Sn, and where two permutations are adjacent if one is obtained from a substring reversal of the other. We determine the spectral gap of Rn, and show that its spectrum contains many integer values. Further we consider a family of graphs that generalize the prefix reversal (or pancake flipping) graph, and show that every graph in this family has adjacency spectral gap equal to one.